Throughout history, kings and queens have lost their thrones - and sometimes their heads - due to political uprisings, civil wars, and outright revolution. Author Dana Schwartz zeroes in on the details of the lives and deaths of royalty on her podcast Noble Blood. In this episode, she tells us about King Charles II after he was smuggled out of England and his father was executed as a tyrant. His exile would take him from the island of Jersey, to Sicily, to the Netherlands, and finally to Scotland, searching for an army to help him regain his crown. “How much would he be willing to give up in order to win back his birthright?” Dana asks. “For Charles II, if it meant being king, the answer was everything.”
King Charles I had a problem. He felt, as an Anglican, that his right to rule was divine, and his will was God’s will. But it seemed the people of England weren’t really into that anymore, and England was mired in a civil war between the royalists and Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarians, who were Protestant. Charles II, only fourteen at the time, fought on the front lines with his father, until it became clear that they were going to lose. “As heir to the throne, Charles II represented a massive threat to the new republic that the parliamentarians were building. His freedom meant royalists could still rally behind him, and so they needed him dead.” Charles II was smuggled out of England. He tried to help the fight from abroad, attempting to rally an army first in France, then the Netherlands, even begging Cromwell’s new government to spare him, but to no avail. Charles I was convicted of treason, and faced the executioner on a cold day in January. “For the first and only time in British history, the executioner brought his blade down on the neck of a monarch. When the executioner held up the head to the crowd, he was expecting cheers. The crowd only gasped.”
Charles II knew the only way back to the throne was with an army, and he had only one more place to turn to: Scotland. He even gave up his father’s most loyal and talented general to gain their help, asking him to invade Scotland on his behalf while he continued to secretly negotiate with the nobles. General Montrose was dragged through the streets and hanged like a common criminal, but Charles II had his army. Now it was time to move on the English. Unfortunately, they were soundly defeated in the Highlands through serious miscalculation. “The Scots massively outnumbered the Englishmen, and they also occupied the high ground, leaving the English soldiers trapped...all [they] had to do was wait them out. But...Scotland charged,” Dana tells us. “Cromwell watched in amazement. ‘The Lord hath delivered them into our hands,’ he said.” So Charles II had to take the fight to English soil, where they lost again, and Charles had to escape: a pretty dangerous task when there’s a huge price on your head and you’re one of the most recognizable figures in the country.
So began weeks of treacherous travel, with faithful Catholics hiding Charles in priest holes, sometimes being tortured or killed for their efforts; several narrow escapes (at one point, Charles had to hide up a tree while English troops searched for him on the forest floor below); and posing as a servant, though he had never worked at manual labor (he had to convince a cook that he didn’t know how to work a roast because his family had always been too poor to afford meat), until Charles II was able to get on a boat to France. Eventually, he regained his crown after Cromwell died, and was welcomed back to England to stave off yet another civil war, but his exile “weeks of piracy and adventure, of death-defying odds and close calls” would leave their mark. Tune in to hear all the exciting details of his escape, and his eventual victory “of waiting and circumstance,” on this episode of Noble Blood.
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